Throwing the book on Eric Adams

 

 New York

In mid-September, shortly after the New York City police chief resigned amid a federal criminal investigation and Mayor Eric Adams’s chief counsel quit, apparently because her client wasn’t heeding legal advice, and a couple of retired Fire Department officials were arrested on bribery charges, Ingrid Lewis-Martin disappeared from City Hall. Lewis-Martin had long been the most loyal and indispensable of Adams’s advisers — he brings the swagger; she swings the stick — so her sudden absence was noted in the building. “She’s not in this country,” one Adams critic told me. “I hear she is on a beach.” Questions kept bubbling up. Was she fighting with Adams? Was she cutting a deal with the Feds? Was she gone from City Hall for good?

In fact, Lewis-Martin was in Japan on what her attorney later described as a personally financed “friend trip,” sightseeing with a group that included the city official and former state senator from Brooklyn Jesse Hamilton, real-estate executive Diana Boutross, and former state assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV. “It was pure vacation,” says Powell, who chronicled his highlights — resort hotels, bullet trains, a night out in Roppongi, a geisha show — on Instagram. The whole time, though, Lewis-Martin’s phone was buzzing. One day, the FBI was searching the interim police commissioner’s house, reportedly looking for classified documents. The health commissioner announced he was on the way out the door and was soon followed by the schools chancellor, whose phone had been seized. City Hall reporters were pestering Lewis-Martin for comment. Rumors were rampant that the mayor was about to go down. On September 26, at around 10 a.m. Tokyo time, the news leaked that Adams had been indicted on corruption charges — a long-anticipated but nonetheless shocking moment in the city’s history.

 

The next day, Lewis-Martin flew home to a city on the brink of a municipal civil war. Some prominent officeholders, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had already called for Adams to resign. Others wanted Governor Kathy Hochul to exercise a seldom-used power to remove him from office, which would trigger a snap special election. A half-dozen potential replacements were jostling for position — including Hochul’s predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, who was looking for a comeback express lane. It appeared certain that more arrests, more scandal, and more pressure would be coming. “We continue to dig,” Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a press conference unveiling the Adams indictment. Investigators had conducted yet another search, this time at Gracie Mansion, earlier that morning. When Lewis-Martin and her travel companions arrived at JFK the next day, Powell heard a loud voice call out at Customs and saw Lewis-Martin pulled to the right. Two separate groups of investigators were waiting. The Feds served her a subpoena for documents, and the Manhattan district attorney’s office had a warrant for her phone. (The Daily News would subsequently report that Hamilton’s was taken too.)

Outraged and device free, Lewis-Martin went to see her criminal-defense attorney, Arthur Aidala, at his office on 45th Street. The investigators, meanwhile, had hit her Brooklyn rowhouse. “They’re using very heavy-handed tactics all around,” Aidala told me. The federal subpoena involved fundraising, he said, and the DA’s warrant was related to an investigation of potential bribery. Lewis-Martin assured her lawyer she had done nothing wrong. He moonlights as an AM-radio host, and she appeared on that evening’s edition of his show, “The Arthur Aidala Power Hour.”

“We are imperfect, but we are not thieves,” she said on the air. “And I do believe that in the end, that the New York City public will see that we have not done anything illegal to the magnitude or the scale that requires the federal government and the DA’s office to investigate us.”

The defense was set: Maybe we’re just a little criminal. The indictment alleged that, for years, starting during his tenure as Brooklyn borough president, Adams had cultivated a relationship with a representative of the Turkish government who arranged for him to receive some $123,000 worth of illegal gifts, such as discounted business-class tickets on Turkish Airlines and a stay in the Bentley Suite at the St. Regis in Istanbul. When Adams ran for mayor, his Turkish supporters allegedly channeled illegal donations to his campaign through straw donors with the connivance of Adams himself. In return, prosecutors say, Adams performed a number of favors as a public official, most notably pressuring FDNY inspectors to certify that the new Turkish Consulate near the U.N. was safe without conducting the necessary inspections.

The mayor’s defenders described all this as a whole lot of nothing. His defense attorney, Alex Spiro, ridiculed the indictment, calling it the “airline-upgrade corruption case,” and filed an immediate motion to dismiss the bribery charge, citing a recent Supreme Court decision that enlarged the bounds of acceptable gift taking. (He had less to say about the foreign donations.) Over the following week, Adams went on the offensive, speaking to Black audiences and looking to clothe his plight in the language of redemption.

“I’m not going to resign,” Adams said at Emmanuel Presbyterian Reformed Church in the Bronx the Sunday after his indictment. “I’m going to reign.”

The city’s political class seemed to take a deep, steadying breath. Influential voices in the Black community called for due process. Hochul went quiet. Everyone would wait to see how deep the rot went. Spiro has said he wants a quick trial, which could occur before next year’s Democratic primary. But investigators appear to be taking their time. They are reportedly looking into the mayor’s dealings with other foreign governments in addition to Turkey and scrutinizing contracts for the school system and migrant shelters. More revelations and indictments are sure to be coming.

Not since the dying days of the Koch administration had the city appeared to be so much for sale, and never in the 126 years since the five boroughs consolidated had any mayor been personally charged with crimes of corruption. Adams and his supporters, determined to brazen it out, were convinced that the old rules of political accountability no longer applied. “We look at what happened with President Trump,” said Bishop Gerald Seabrooks, a minister who prayed with Adams at Gracie Mansion the morning the indictment was unsealed. “Thirty-four counts, and nobody is asking him not to run.” (During a press conference, Trump wished Adams luck in his legal fight.) Adams loyalists signaled that if Cuomo, or anyone else, wanted the mayoralty, they would have to take it. “We don’t worry about what’s in the shadows,” said attorney Frank Carone, the mayor’s still-influential former chief of staff. “The mayor is not resigning — full stop.”

With Ingrid Lewis-Martin at a rally of clergy and community leaders outside City Hall on October 1. Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux

Eric Adams had the talent to be a great mayor. He is as lively as his city and loves its nightlife, even if it brings him into contact with some unsavory characters. He is funny, and there’s a lightness to his egotistical flourishes, like his prodigious use of the possessive case (“my city,” “my cops”) and his practice of walking out to “Empire State of Mind” when performing even the smallest mayoral function, like wheeling the Sanitation Department’s new trash can up to a press conference.

Until recently, Adams’s habits of evasion, of creating a fog of mystery around even the most basic questions — where does he live? What does he eat? — had mostly made him seem like a scamp, not a criminal. Even after his indictment, some of those who had worked for him found it hard to believe he is personally crooked. “I’m certain that Eric is not corrupt,” says a former Adams aide. “On the other hand, Eric can have terrible judgment in people and is incredibly stubborn.” Adams has often called himself “perfectly imperfect,” a phrase that now seems likely to serve as his epitaph, however the end comes. The positive side of his record includes his hiring of a number of highly competent — and mostly female — deputies and empowering them to run much of the city with minimal interference. The imperfections start with some of the other individuals on his payroll, who represent the very worst that city politics has to offer.

“How did we get here? He brought with him a set of people whose track record of corrupt activity was already well known,” says Brad Lander, the city comptroller and a declared candidate for mayor in the next election. “I think that sent a broad signal to people that this was an administration with a very high tolerance for corruption. And unfortunately, a lot of people seem to have gotten that message and then people who did really genuinely try to do things with integrity paid for it.”

Reports of corruption have dogged Adams’s administration since its earliest days; now, they’re just more detailed. Straw donations. A nightclub-shakedown racket. Nepotism hires. A buildings commissioner who took alleged bribes from alleged mobsters. A mayoral crony who supposedly cried out, “Where are my crumbs?” And it was all so crummy, so careless, so old-school, so Tammany Hall.

“It’s a surprise to me how stupid they seem to be,” says one veteran of Brooklyn politics who has seen a few bosses come and go. “In the sense that if you’re going to milk your positions for private gain, that they weren’t more thoughtful about how they went about doing it.”